By ANDREW SCHNEIDER and CAROL SMITH
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

(c) 2000 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved.

Three major brands of crayons -- scribbled with and nibbled on by millions of children worldwide -- contain asbestos, tests conducted for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer show.

Eight brands were examined -- four domestic and four manufactured overseas. Analysis of three brands -- Crayola, Prang and Rose Art -- by two government-certified laboratories repeatedly showed the crayons contained asbestos.

Of the 40 crayons tested from the brands that had asbestos, 80 percent of them were contaminated above the trace level.

As the manufacturers and the federal government reacted with surprise and concern to the P-I's test results yesterday, the institute that is paid to certify the crayons as non-toxic initially said that crayons could not contain asbestos. The institute's chief toxicologist said the P-I's tests were likely mistaken. But then he acknowledged the institute does not routinely test for asbestos.

The crayon makers said product safety is a paramount concern, and some said they had already begun to review their manufacturing processes and materials in light of the P-I's findings.

The asbestos is most likely a contaminant of the talc that most companies use in crayons as a strengthener for the paraffin and coloring agents.

Public-health experts, including pediatricians and asbestos specialists, reacted angrily and called for the immediate removal of asbestos from crayons.

"It just makes no sense in the world to put a substance with the toxicity of . . . asbestos in crayons when safe alternatives exist," said Dr. Philip Landrigan, pediatrician and director of the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Brooklyn, N.Y.

"This is not a circumstance where you go through the rigorous toxicological and epidemiological studies," Landrigan said. "You just get it out of there."

The P-I tested the crayons as part of its continuing examination of asbestos hazards in consumer products and the difficulties of regulating them.

In Crayolas, by far the world's largest-selling crayon, the amount of asbestos ranged from .05 percent in Carnation Pink to 2.86 percent in Orchid. Prang went from .3 percent in its Periwinkle to .54 percent in a yellow crayon. Rose Art had .03 percent in a brown crayon and 1.20 percent in an orange.

"We are in the process of looking at all of our materials," said Tracey Muldoon Moran, a corporate spokesperson for Binney & Smith, which makes Crayolas, after the P-I notified the company of the test results.

"With the information that we have today, we do believe that our products pose no health threat, but we have already begun to investigate alternatives to the material being questioned -- the talc -- so we can properly address any potential concerns consumers might have," she said.

"We have taken this matter very seriously and were getting as much information as we can. Safety is crucial to our brand and the trust we've built with consumers."

Prang Crayons are made in Sandusky, Ohio, by the Dixon Ticonderoga Co. of Heathrow, Fla.

Ronald Shaffer, Dixon Ticonderoga's chief operating officer, said his company's main concern is the safety of its products.

"Every crayon that we and our competition makes are for the kids and we spend a lot of money certifying the safety of our products through testing done by the Arts and Creative Materials Institute," said Shaffer. "They set all the standards for the toxicity testing and they tell us that there isn't asbestos in the crayons.

"We are collecting all of the information from our suppliers that provide the talc, trying to see what they know is in it."

Repeated attempts were made to contact officials from Rose Art Industries Inc. in Livingston, N.J., but no one could be reached for comment.

No one could point to any study that has examined the asbestos contamination of crayons, but everyone interviewed agreed that asbestos at any level should not be in products that children play with.

The dangers of asbestos are well known. Tens of thousands of miners, shipyard and construction workers and their family members have died of asbestos-caused diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency banned products containing the lethal fibers in July 1989, but two years later a federal appeals court threw out the ban after a legal challenge by the U.S. and Canadian asbestos industries. Despite increased attention by the EPA to asbestos in consumer products, the agency's leadership has not attempted to reinstate the ban.

The amounts of asbestos found in the crayons were far lower than the exposures received by workers. But many studies show that infants and children are far more susceptible to toxins and carcinogens than adults.

One of the problems is that the latency period -- the length of time between exposure and the onset of disease -- can be 20 years or more.

To ensure that the asbestos in crayons purchased in the Seattle area was not a regional anomaly, the P-I also bought and tested crayons bought in Massachusetts, Florida, Texas and California. The level of asbestos contamination was consistent in all of them.

The laboratories contracted by the P-I reported only the asbestos fibers that government and medical experts have stated are the length, size-ratio and type known to cause cancer.

The Art and Creative Materials Institute, a trade association paid to certify such materials as non-toxic, insisted the tests must be wrong.

"There is no asbestos in crayons," said Debbie Fanning, the institute's executive director. "The toxicologist evaluates the products and if there was asbestos in crayons, he'd be right on top of that. We check for lead in crayons and asbestos is that much worse," she answered when asked how she knows the crayons aren't contaminated.

The institute's toxicologist, Dr. Woodhall Stopford, suggested that the government-certified laboratories used by the P-I were "confused" as to what they were seeing under the microscope. The labs, which routinely do work for the EPA, stand by their results.